The Met and its cohorts are out of control. Step in and sort them, Boris

Tuesday 21 April 2009 09:35 BST

The Met is in a mess and knows it. The reason is that nobody is in charge, and nobody will do what must be done, which is wind up the riot squad, fatuously renamed the Territorial Support Group. It has become that most lethal institution, a quasi-autonomous force within a force. It has become London's echo of Ulster's former B-Specials.

We have been here before. When Robert Mark became chief constable of the Met in 1972, he declared that his first task was to gain control of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). He told its members that "they had long been the most ­routinely corrupt organisation in London". He astonished one audience by saying that the way to stop the rash of bank raids then afflicting London was not to unleash the CID but disband it. He suspended some 50 officers and ­London bank raids — many staged in collusion with the CID — all but ceased.

The Tomlinson incident during the G20 demonstrations was a classic of what happens when any public service abandons accountability and turns in on itself. I recently spoke to a young policeman who was on duty that day and he related how they had been pent up since 4am on 1 April in an over-resourced response to Downing Street's boosting of G20 to glorify the Prime Minister.

By the time the highly strung TSG were deployed to the City, they were itching for action, indeed "raring to go". Its members had no time for ­ordinary constables, let alone protesters, and little time even for the forward intelligence teams (FITs) who were supposed to know what was happening and could direct or restrain the riot squad.

The TSG is a cocooned elite. Pictures of a sergeant, a platoon commander in charge of line discipline, apparently going berserk with a truncheon looked ominously like a man showing off before his subordinates. Team ethos had become more important than the job in hand. Loyalty was not to the public but to the canteen: hence the obscuring of identification numbers in flagrant contravention of orders to the contrary.

Other filmed cases now coming before the Independent Police ­Complaints Commission (IPCC) of police ostensibly punching, manhandling and hitting with shields suggest a syndrome similar to that revealed in the de Menezes case, of a paramilitary predisposition to violence overcoming what should be extreme restraint in the face of provocation. I know of cases of the TSG arriving at school gates to rough up black pupils "on suspicion" of carrying knives, to show neighbourhood constables "how it should be done".

As Mark said on coming to the CID: "I had never experienced institutionalised wrongdoing, blindness, ­arrogance and prejudice on anything like the scale accepted as routine in the Met." The cause, and it has not gone away, lay in the Met's size and bureaucratisation and in the absence of clear political leadership.

The Met was then run entirely by the Home Office. Mark was able to reform the Met only because he won the ­support of the Home Secretaries, ­Reginald Maudling and later Roy Jenkins. Against him was a vicious CID lobby, supported by corrupt ­journalists in Fleet Street.

The Met still lacks clear political leadership. It is run by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in uneasy ­harness with the Home Secretary, ­Jacqui Smith. Smith was angry when Johnson took the lead in the removal of Sir Ian Blair as Commissioner and in the recent, absurd removal of the terrorism chief, Bob Quick, for failing to conceal a document from cameras. But Johnson was at least within his rights and seemed at last to be ­asserting his statutory authority against a dysfunctional Home Office, whose mismanagement of the Met can only be termed institutionally ­catastrophic.

The G20 protests should have been handled with light-touch tolerance, rather than a repeat of the clod-­hopping thuggery of the 2001 G7 in Genoa. Only a tiny minority of these protesters were a lunatic fringe, enjoying little public support.

The "kettling" policy, a crude form of prior arrest, is a blatant infringement of the right to demonstrate. Having been kettled myself in Oxford Circus in 2001 (thanks to Ken Livingstone), I can only attest that it is a form of coercion more akin to communist East Europe. Like the parking of police cars on pavements and in parks, it shows the arrogance of a force that has lost touch with the people to whom it supposedly accounts.

It is no longer Peel's "citizens in ­uniform".

The new Mayor and his police chief, Sir Paul Stephenson, have asserted their independence of the Home ­Secretary. They need to put that ­independence to use. Stephenson has indicated a desire to re-establish ­public support for the Met, including the re‑introduction of single-handed beat policing. Since his three predecessors all promised that, it will be a good test of his leadership.

Beat policing is everything the public likes and police hate. There has been no great increase in assaults on the police, yet they walk London festooned with weaponry and armour like ­American Action Man marines. They go "four-handed" to have someone to chat with who also speaks police. God forbid they should communicate with shopkeepers, businesses, motorists, young people or mere citizens, who in police theory should be their eyes and ears.

Ask police authorities outside London about the Met and all say the same. It is a law unto itself, largely because it has always been run by central government. The Met now faces a manslaughter charge, some 90 witnessed accusations before the IPCC, two Commons committee inquiries and a government inspection of its public order tactics. Yet it is supposedly run by a democratically elected Mayor of London.

There are now calls for a royal ­commission on London's police. ­Rubbish. It just needs leadership. With Jacqui Smith a broken reed and Stephenson invisible, Johnson should seize the moment. He should demand the disbanding of the TSG and put its macho troops on the beat where they belong. There they can reassure the public of the presence of order and help prevent real crime, rather than roam London looking for aggro and helping create it.